How Solas and Lavellan can both die but still end up together: Keeping the theme of ‘hopefulness’ through the arc of  the Solavellan romance (2024)

I am torturing myself at this point, but there’s something so distinctly beautiful about an ending for Solas and Lavellan where because the memory of their love is so strong, so well-known throughout Thedas, that this remembrance is part of what gives birth to their continuation in the Fade. Patrick Weekes has referred to this romance as“ultimately a hopeful one”, and I think this theme of memory shaping reality will give Solas and Lavellan their happy ending, or, in keeping with the overall romance theme, at leasta hopeful one.

I want Solas to resist helping up until the last second when he sees Lavellan willingly engage in an action that will end in her death, and he sees her plan working before his very eyes. This is the moment that he realizes:He was wrong. It becomes clear that unless he helps her, her sacrifice will be in vain – whatever it is, it needs more than she can give. This is Solas’ moment of commitment to Lavellan that he ran away from in Crestwood, and, beyond that, it is also an act of redemption.

Their lives end at each other’s sides, and maybe there’s a touching moment, maybe just a look of understanding, of shared experiences and grief and love (because Lavellan always believed and part of Solas always hoped: var lath vir suledin), and he pools the rest of his power into whatever process Lavellan has set in motion, and we see, like with Wisdom in All New Faded For Her, their spirits dissipating into the ether.

I would love to see an epilogue that is as far as hundreds of years into the future, where whatever state the world is in now, it is made clear that Solas and Lavellan’s love story has endured. We can imagine that they are the sort of fated couple that has inspired romances in dramas or literature. This serves two roles:

1. It sets it up for the player who has romanced Solas to know that their romance was real, that, finally, Solas and Lavellan have a positive ending, and their love was not for nothing. It sets it apart from a storyline with a non-Solas romanced Inquisitor in a way that’s meaningful but not difficult to do.

2. "If the idea giving the spirit form is strong, or if the memory has shaped other spirits, it may someday rise again.”We get the sense that Solas and Lavellan might not really be gone, some incarnation of their spirits may have reformed and found each other once more, tucked away in the woods somewhere, together for eternity, actually living the fantasy so many players hoped to see them live out.

In another world, indeed.